Bees have similar (to zero) cognitive abilities to humans.

Bees seem to understand the concept of zero - the first invertebrate to be proven to do so.
when bees are encouraged to fly to a platform with fewer shapes, they clearly realize that "no shape" is a smaller number than "having some shapes."
to find out if bees can understand zero, Scarlett Howard and colleagues at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia first trained bees to distinguish between two numbers.
they set up two platforms, each with 1 to 4 shapes on it.
bees get sweet sucrose solutions on one platform, and quinine solutions that emit an unpleasant smell on the other platform.
researchers trained bees to link platforms with fewer shapes to sweet rewards until they made the right choice 80 percent of the time.
the bees were further tested for the appearance of objects of different shapes to determine how they responded to the number of shapes rather than their appearance.
when choosing between two or three shapes or "zero" shapes, bees choose zero most of the time.
the second experiment, other bees were trained in the same way.
, however, this time they had to choose to land on a platform with no objects or one or six objects.
they've been choosing zeros, but when the other options are one object rather than six, it becomes less accurate and takes more time.
a recent behavioral conference in Estoril, Portugal, Howard said the numerical distance between the two numbers seemed to affect how challenging the bee discovery problem was.
and this provides further evidence that bees have zero cognition as a number.
such experiments have shown that bees' perception of zero is similar to that of some humans and primates.
, however, it is not clear why they have such capabilities.
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